• Emerging from 12 months in stealth, Nolea Health has secured £1m in Seed funding from Frontline Ventures, Calm/Storm Ventures, and various angel investors. 
• Nolea’s jobs marketplace looks to revolutionise how healthcare providers find clinical talent and healthcare professionals find jobs, unlocking the supply-demand mismatch to exponentially bring more care delivery capacity to the European market.
• The company was founded by CEO Richie Dawes, previously the CTO of a leading UK mental healthcare clinic and an expert in building marketplace platforms.

London, UK  – Nolea Health, a healthcare jobs marketplace platform, today announced that it had raised £1 million in Seed funding. This financing round marks the company’s formal public launch after 12 months in stealth. The round was led by Frontline Ventures, with participation from Calm/Storm Ventures and other notable industry figures, including Anne Heraty, ex-CEO of CPL Resources, and Mahiben Maruthappu, CEO of Cera.

CEO Richie Dawes, the ex-CTO of a leading UK mental healthcare company, Clinical Partners, spent three years building its full-stack virtual care technology before founding Nolea Health in 2022. Nolea Health is creating a national network of mental healthcare professionals and making them discoverable on its transparent jobs marketplace to solve Europe’s growing shortages in healthcare staff. Nolea Health’s marketplace focus partly draws from Dawes’s extensive experience leading prominent e-commerce marketplace launches for JustEat, YOOX Net-a-Porter Group, Gianni Versace S.r.l, and Conde Nast’s style.com.

Nolea Health is a jobs marketplace that matches mental healthcare clinicians with the right vacant jobs across different healthcare organisations and health systems. The platform’s matching algorithm utilises the clinician’s profile data, such as experience, education and work preferences, with employers’ job requirements, location, and work culture, to increase the likelihood of successful matches and hires for short-term work opportunities. Once matched, the company hires the clinician to deliver short-term remote-based and in-person mental healthcare.

“Our mental healthcare industry is in crisis. The demand for services is growing, while the supply of skilled professionals is dwindling. Our mission at Nolea Health is to create a revolutionary platform that will change how healthcare providers find talent and healthcare professionals find jobs. With our innovative approach, we believe we can make a real difference in this area and successfully address the urgent issue of staff shortages.” says Dawes.

“Following the outbreak of Covid-19, we’ve seen a huge increase in the use of telemedicine. Whilst this theoretically unlocks a broader range of clinical talent for healthcare centres, the challenge of hiring and managing the right staff remains a significant bottleneck.

Nolea solves this by providing a staffing tool that is easy to integrate and scale for any clinic, GP or hospital wishing to utilise telemedicine.

Richie’s background in healthcare and his experience in launching marketplaces puts him in prime position to build the perfect solution to this urgent issue.” said Frontline Ventures Partner, William McQuillan.

Nolea’s digital workflow technology streamlines the talent acquisition process for healthcare organisations’ hiring teams and reduces hiring process friction. Employers can effortlessly browse, and instantly discover, the best clinical talent on demand. One of Nolea’s key features is its comprehensive clinician directory, containing verified and vetted healthcare professionals. The platform’s matching technology allows organisations to upload vacant positions and receive suitable clinician matches within 24 hours. This feature expedites the hiring experience, enabling organisations to fast-track candidates to the interview stage.

Nolea Health’s focus extends beyond just healthcare employers; the platform has also prioritised delivering an exceptional experience to healthcare professionals. Clinicians can easily share their dynamic availability, enabling employers to find suitable candidates for their open positions. Additionally, clinicians can manage all licensing and credential data in one place, saving valuable time on both sides during the onboarding process.

According to Dawes, “We saw mental healthcare as the ideal starting point, given the tremendous growth in demand in recent years, and the widespread adoption of remote-based care in the post-COVID world. This shift in momentum has created new flexible work opportunities for the full spectrum of mental healthcare professionals, many of whom may have historically been overlooked by healthcare companies because of the demand for accredited healthcare professionals over qualified equivalent healthcare staff roles.” 

Nolea Health has made significant strides in the last 12 months, receiving its first investment check through ODX, the On Deck Global Accelerator program in January 2022 and participating in the Google Black Founder Fund program last summer. The company received non-dilutive cash grants, Google Cloud credits, and hands-on support.

“We are delighted to have played a part in Nolea Health’s journey and to see its positive impact in the healthcare industry. Nolea Health’s innovative approach to addressing mental health challenges is inspiring. We are proud to have supported Nolea Health through our program,” said Mariama Boumanjal, Google for Startups Black Founders Fund Manager Europe and Africa. 

Nolea Health was also selected for the Digital Launchpad London program this year, designed for early-stage digital health companies with high potential to meet NHS and social care challenges. Through these programs, Nolea Health has brought its vision of improving mental healthcare to fruition.

The company has been testing its jobs marketplace with leading UK healthcare organisations and has observed a significant improvement in the productivity of healthcare recruiters and talent acquisition managers, averaging an increase of 200 to 400 percent. Moreover, recruiters save 45 hours of key activity time each week, affirming the efficiency of Nolea’s technology in healthcare job-matching, giving Nolea the confidence to double down on its go-to-market strategy.

“The Covid-19 pandemic unveiled a broken healthcare system – an increasing number of people report mental health issues, leading to staff shortages, long working hours and burned-out professionals in therapy and beyond. We are excited to see Nolea addressing the core problem of healthcare providers needing help finding enough staff to serve their patients. The innovative white-label clinician marketplace platform also enables clinicians that want work flexibility, multiple work opportunities, access to digital tools, and upskilling opportunities. With Richie’s background in scaling a mental healthcare clinic, we believe the founder-market-fit is exceptional.,” said Calm/Storm Founding Partner, Lucanus Polagnoli.

With the recent funding, Nolea Health plans to expand its team and further develop its machine learning-based technology, doubling down on improving its clinical job-matching capabilities.

Nolea Health also aims to expand its reliable job marketplace beyond mental healthcare to address workforce planning challenges and staff shortages in other areas of healthcare.

Nolea is in beta with a growing network of mental healthcare clinicians and leading mental healthcare organisations, with an initial focus on mental healthcare jobs. It is actively recruiting healthcare clinicians nationally. 

Interested mental healthcare clinicians can contact Nolea Health at [email protected], or you can learn more and sign up today at www.noleahealth.com.

---

About Nolea Health:

Nolea Health is a jobs marketplace connecting healthcare professionals with healthcare providers, committed to improving healthcare access and positively impacting the industry. Launched in 2022 and headquartered in London, UK, Nolea Health is poised to disrupt the healthcare industry by streamlining the talent acquisition process for healthcare organisations. For more information on Nolea Health and its platform, visit www.getnolea.com.

About Richie Dawes:

Richie Dawes is a technical Black British Founder & CEO of Nolea Health, a healthcare jobs marketplace platform to connect healthcare professionals with providers. With a strong background in healthcare technology, Richie served as the CTO of a private mental healthcare clinic, where he helped scale their virtual healthcare service to millions of pounds in annual revenues. Richie is passionate about reinventing healthcare delivery models, empowering clinicians, and revolutionising the future of work in healthcare. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Business Management and a Master’s in Cognitive and Decision Sciences MSc from Imperial College London’s Division of Psychology.

About Frontline Ventures

Frontline is the venture firm for globally ambitious B2B companies on both sides of the Atlantic. Frontline Seed speeds up ideas at inception across Europe. Frontline X is a growth-stage fund, for fast and frictionless US-Europe expansion.

Our investment team, LPs and advisors represent senior leadership at many of the world’s most successful B2B companies (Think: Segment, Stripe, Looker, Linkedin, Airtable, Google and Workday – to name a few). Collectively, we add value when founders need it most – at company defining moments.